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On Being Human

Woodrow Wilson
Ph.D., Litt.D., LL.D.
President of the United States

1897
From the Atlantic Monthly

On Being Human

I

"The rarest sort of a book," says Mr. Bagehot, slyly, is "a book
to read"; and "the knack in style is to write like a human
being." It is painfully evident, upon experiment, that not many
of the books which come teeming from our presses every year are
meant to be read. They are meant, it may be, to be pondered; it
is hoped, no doubt, they may instruct, or inform, or startle, or
arouse, or reform, or provoke, or amuse us; but we read, if we
have the true reader's zest and plate, not to grow more knowing,
but to be less pent up and bound within a little circle, as
those who take their pleasure, and not as those who laboriously
seek instruction, as a means of seeing and enjoying the world
of men and affairs. We wish companionship and renewal of spirit,
enrichment of thought and the full adventure of the mind; and we
desire fair company, and a larger world in which to find them.

No one who loves the masters who may be communed with and read
but must see, therefore, and resent the error of making the text
of any one of them a source to draw grammar from, forcing the
parts of speech to stand out stark and cold from the warm text;
or a store of samples whence to draw rhetorical instances,
setting up figures of speech singly and without support of any
neighbor phrase, to be stared at curiously and with intent to
copy or dissect! Here is grammar done without deliberation: the
phrases carry their meaning simply and by a sort of limpid
reflection; the thought is a living thing, not an image
ingeniously contrived and wrought. Pray leave the text whole: it
has no meaning piecemeal; at any rate, not that best, wholesome
meaning, as of a frank and genial friend who talks, not for
himself or for his phrase, but for you. It is questionable morals
to dismember a living frame to seek for its obscure fountains of
life!

When you say that a book was meant to be read, you mean, for one
thing, of course, that it was not meant to be studied. You do not
study a good story, or a haunting poem, or a battle song, or a
love ballad, or any moving narrative, whether it be out of
history or out of fiction nor any argument, even, that moves
vital in the field of action. You do not have to study these
things; they reveal themselves, you do not stay to see how. They
remain with you, and will not be forgotten or laid by. They cling
like a personal experience, and become the mind's intimates. You
devour a book meant to be read, not because you would fill
yourself or have an anxious care to be nourished, but because it
contains such stuff as it makes the mind hungry to look upon.
Neither do you read it to kill time, but to lengthen time,
rather, adding to its natural usury by living the more abundantly
while it lasts, joining another's life and thought to your own.

There are a few children in every generation, as Mr. Bagehot
reminds us, who think the natural thing to do with any book is to
read it. "There is an argument from design in the subject," as he
says; "if the book was not meant to be read for that purpose, for
what purpose was it meant?" These are the young eyes to which
books yield up great treasure, almost in spite of themselves, as
if they had been penetrated by some swift, enlarging power of
vision which only the young know. It is these youngsters to whom
books give up the long ages of history, "the wonderful series
going back to the times of old patriarchs with their flocks and
herds" I am quoting Mr. Bagehot again "the keen eyed Greek,
the stately Roman, the watching Jew, the uncouth Goth, the horrid
Hun, the settled picture of the unchanging East, the restless
shifting of the rapid West, the rise of the cold and classical
civilization, its fall, the rough impetuous Middle Ages, the
vague warm picture of ourselves and home. When did we learn
these? Not yesterday nor today, but long ago, in the first dawn
of reason, in the original flow of fancy... Continue reading book >>